Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Ross, you might want to look into iRise. I was assigned a project very late in the development phase and the BAs pretty much used iRise to create an “alpha” prototype. Look and feel was horrendous (BAs aren’t designers) and I never personally used it but from what I could tell the purpose of iRise is to aid analysts with their functional design specs and possibly IA/UX/UI people in generating look and feel but also mocking up and generating code for the application or website itself.

Ok thanks. I think it might be out of our price range…I work for a university.

a LOT of folks are digging powerpoint for prototyping http://boxesandarrows.com/view/interactive

I bought and worked with several programs … IMHO ConceptDraw (project) is awesome, completely full of features to do develope each deliverable from mindmaps to wireframes and prototyping. In my point of view ConceptDraw is a full application for pros and amateurs. The extended library, shapes, functions and tools let any kind of users to express there ideas. I am very glad to see a product that can compete with Visio in terms of functionality, definitely on price, and its cross-platform functionality is unbeatable – I can work on my PC and my MAC _ especially as a freelancer ConceptDraw give me more “freedom”. ... but I heard of ConceptDraw WebWave – has anybody experiences with ConceptDraw WebWave?

Christina has suggested it – we also use Powerpoint very sucessfully. It is installed on most business users PC and they are used or trained to work with it. What you need to work with Powerpoint are defined UI standards. Then you simply create slides with your basic page layouts, and grouped elements that resembles your basic application elements like buttons, entry fields, tables etc. The user simply copies the elements, put them on the screen and changes the content like labels. Even functional users are able to do this. By creating a sequence of slides with slight changes you are even able to simulate user behaviour like field entries, and thereby validating process flows or UI usability.

I’ve been having some great luck with Fireworks CS3. I just got back from Web Design World 08 in Chicago, where some of the power of this app was shown to the audience. With drag and drop symbols like textboxes, sliders, multi-selects, etc. (for both Mac and Windows looks), you can also assign clicks to buttons and simply publish to a directory, using Fireworks’s “pages to files” export option. Then copy that whole package up to a web server, or to your USB key, and present to the client. The client gets a really good feel for clickthrough and workflow, while also seeing the visual elements. You can craft it as tightly or loosely as you need, even laying the site out in wireframes and then filling it in with color after iterative demonstrations.

I love Fireworks. I know why Adobe gives it short schrift because it really is a Photoshop Killer in terms of web design and Adobe would rather sell you a $1000 app than a $350 app. People who haven’t used it don’t realize the power of this unassuming application. The whole Photoshop/Imageready “solution” is immature compared to it.

What’s so great about Fireworks is that except for some automation stuff, it blows away Visio in terms of building wireframes.

Then you can upgrade those wireframes and start designing your site in the same way you’d used Illustrator (multiple, moveable objects can be on a single layer… unlike Photoshop which puts everything in its own layer which is insane).

Then you can slice up the design, apply code to the slices, export everything to generic code or Dreamweaver-ready code or whatever you want.

Pull into Dreamweaver or GoLive and you’re 70% done.

I’ve been using Photoshop since 1990, and I use Visio every day, but I’ll take Fireworks if I had to choose a single application to get my work done.

Nice! Dudes!

Prototyping and Wireframing overview:
http://ux4dotcom.blogspot.com/2010/12/prototyping-and-wir…